Interpersonal Communication (Final Exam)

Why We Communicate

- Communication meets physical needs.

- Communication meets relational needs.

- Communication fills identity needs.

- Communication meets spiritual needs.

- Communication serves instrumental needs.

Instrumental Needs

Practical, everyday needs. (Ex. ordering a drink, getting a job, etc.)

Communication as Action

Communication thought of as a one-way process. The SOURCE comes up with a thought or idea, ENCODES (conveys with language or gesture) it, and creates a MESSAGE ➝ the MESSAGE is then sent through a channel to the RECEIVER ➝ the RECEIVER finally DECODES it ➝ NOISE may interfere. NOISE can be psychological, physiological, or physical.

Communication as Interaction

Contains the same elements as the action model, but includes FEEDBACK, which are verbal and nonverbal responses to a message, and CONTEXT, which is the physical or psychological environment in which communication occurs. Both of these elements shape the interaction process.

Communication as Transaction

No distinction between SOURCE and RECEIVER. Both members of an interaction are simultaneously SOURCES and RECEIVERS. Conversation flows in both directions at the same time, as well. FEEDBACK is a message in and of itself.

Six Characteristics of Communication

- Communication relies on multiple channels: the different ways in which people convey messages, such as facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, etc. Channel-rich contexts vs. channel-lean contexts.

- Communication passes through perceptual filters: we filter what we are hearing through our different ideals, experiences, etc. I may listen to the same speech as a Republican, but take away different things than the Republican did.

- People give communication its meaning: we decide what words mean. Includes symbols.

- Communication has literal meanings and relational implications: involves content dimension vs. relational dimension.

- Communication sends a message, whether intentional or unintentional.

- Communication is governed by rules: involves explicit rules vs. implicit rules.

Channel-Rich Context

A communication context involving many channels at once. For example, in face-to-face interactions you can hear your conversational partner's voice, see their facial expressions, etc.

Channel-Lean Context

A communication context involving few channels at once. For example, in text messaging, text is the only channel.

Symbol

A representation of an idea.

Content Dimension

Literal information that is communicated by a message.

Relational Dimension

Signals about the relationship in which a message is being communicated.

Communication Myths

- Everyone is an expert in communication.

- Communication will solve any problem.

- Communication can break down.

- Communication is inherently good.

- More communication is always better.

Being a Competent Communicator

- Self-awareness: involves self-monitoring, of an awareness of one's behavior and how it effects others. High self-monitors pay attention to how they look, sound, and act, while low self-monitors don't.

- Adaptability.

- Empathy.

- Cognitive complexity: the ability to understand a given situation in multiple ways.

- Ethics: a code of morality or a set of ideas about what is right.

Components of Culture

- Symbols.

- Language.

- Values.

- Norms.

Co-Culture

Groups of people who share values, customs, and norms related to mutual interests or characteristics beyond their natural citizenship. For example, you can be apart of co-cultures based on your age, ethnicity, etc.

Low-Context Culture

A culture in which verbal communication is expected to be explicit and is often interpreted literally. For example, in the U.S., being straight to the point is preferred.

High-Context Culture

A culture in which verbal communication is often ambiguous, and meaning is drawn from contextual cues, such as facial expression and tone of voice. For example, countries like Korea emphasize harmony, which can involve being less direct.

Low-Power-Distance Culture

A culture in which people believe that no one person or group should have excessive power. (Ex. U.S.)

High-Power-Distance Culture

A culture in which certain groups, such as the royal family or the members of the ruling political party, have much greater power than the average citizen. (Ex. Mexico, Brazil.)

Monochronic

Time is treated as a finite commodity that can be earned, saved, spent, and wasted.

Polychronic

Time is treated as an infinite resource.

Uncertainty Avoidance

The degree to which people try to avoid situations that are unstructured, unclear, or unpredictable.

Masculine Gender Role

Emphasizes strength, dominance, competition, and logical thinking.

Female Gender Role

Emphasizes expressive, nurturing behavior.

Androgynous Gender Role

A combination of masculine and feminine characteristics.

Self-Concept

The set of stable ideas a person has about who he or she is; also known as identity.

- They are multifaceted: I am Jennifer. I am a woman. I am a musician. Many different pieces and layers contribute to our self concept.

- They are partly subjective: some things are facts, such as our heights and hair colors. Others are subjective, seen differently by different people.

- They are enduring, but changeable: can be due to significant life events or developmental changes.

Johari Window

Visual representation of components of the self that are known or unknown to the self and to others.

- Open: known to self and others.

- Blind: known to others, but not to self.

- Hidden: known to self, but not to others.

- Unknown: not known to self or others. (Ex. what kind of parent will you be? Neither you nor the other people in your life will know until it happens.)

How the Self Concept Develops

- Personality and biology: personality is defined as the pattern of behaviors and ways of thinking that characterize a person.

- Culture and gender roles.

- Reflected appraisal: the process whereby a person's self-concept is influenced by his or her beliefs concerning what other people think of the person.

- Social comparison: the process of comparing oneself with others. We compare ourselves to reference groups.

Self-Esteem

One's subjective evaluation of one's value and worth as a person.

The Self and Interpersonal Needs

- Need for control: one's need to maintain a degree of influence in one's relationships.

- Need for inclusion: one's need to belong to a social group and be included in the activities of others.

- Need for affection: one's need to give and receive expressions of love and appreciation.

Face

A person's desired public image.

Face Needs

Components of one's desired public image.

Facework

The behaviors one uses to project one's desired public image to others.

Fellowship Face

The need to feel liked and accepted by others.

Autonomy Face

The need to avoid being imposed upon by others.

Competence Face

The need to be respected and viewed as competent and intelligent.

Face-Threatening Act

Any behavior that threatens on or more face needs.

Self-Disclosure

The act of giving others information about oneself that one believes they do not already have.

- It is intentional and truthful.

- It varies in breadth (range of topics) and depth (intimacy of topics).

- It varies among relationships.

- It is a gradual process.

- When online, it follows a different pattern.

- It is usually reciprocal.

- It can serve many purposes.

- It is influenced by cultural and gender roles.

Social Penetration Theory

Predicts that as relationships develop, communication increases in breadth and depth. (Onion metaphor: public, personal, inner core.)

Norm of Reciprocity

Assumption that if someone does something for a person, that person should do something for the other in return.

Perception and Interpersonal Perception

The process of making meaning from the things we experience in the environment. Interpersonally, the process of making meaning from the people in our environment and our relationships with them.

Perceptual Process

- Selection: the process of attending to a stimulus.

- Organization: the process of categorizing information that has been selected for attention. Involves four types of schemas: physical constructs (people's appearance, such as objective characteristics like height, weight, etc.), role constructs (people's social or professional position), interaction constructs (people's behavior), and psychological constructs (people's thoughts and feelings).

- Interpretation: the process of assigning meaning to information that has been selected for attention and organized.

Perceptual Set

A predisposition to perceive only what we want or expect to perceive.

Positivity Bias

Tendency to focus heavily on a person's positive attributes when forming a perception.

Negativity Bias

Tendency to focus heavily on a person's negative attributes when forming a perception.

Perception Checking

- Separate interpretations from facts.

- Generate alternative perceptions

- Engage in perception-checking behaviors: direct perception checking (simply asking other people if your perception is accurate; involves acknowledging behavior witnessed, interpreting that behavior, asking whether your interpretation was correct) and indirect perception checking (observing and listening to find additional information).

Nonverbal Communication

Behaviors and characteristics that convey meaning without the use of words.

Characteristics of Nonverbal Communication

- It is present in most interpersonal conversations.

- It often conveys more information than verbal communication.

- It is usually believed over verbal communication.

- It is the primary means of communicating emotion.

- It metacommunicates.

Functions of Nonverbal Communication

- Managing conversations: inviting, maintaining, or ending conversations.

- Expressing emotions.

- Maintaining relationships: attraction and affiliation, power and dominance, arousal and relaxation.

- Forming impressions: demographic and sociocultural impressions.

- Influencing others: creating credibility (ex. judge's black robes) and promoting affiliation.

- Concealing information.

Immediacy Behaviors

Nonverbal signals of affection and affiliation.

Channels of Nonverbal Communication

- Facial displays.

- Eye behaviors: also known as oculesics.

- Movement and gestures: also known as kinesics. Involves gesticulation, which is the use of arm and hand movements to communicate. Includes emblems (gesture with direct verbal translation), illustrators (gesture that enhances/clarifies a verbal message), affect displays (gesture that communicates emotion), regulators (gesture that controls flow of conversation), and adaptors (gesture used to satisfy a personal need, like itching).

- Touch behaviors: also known as haptics. Different types include affectionate, caregiving, power and control, aggressive, and ritualistic.

- Vocal behaviors: also known as vocalics. Includes pitch, inflection, volume, rate, filler words, pronunciation, articulation, accent, and silence.

- Smell: also known as olfactics.

- Space: also known as proxemics. Includes intimate distance (0-1 1/2 ft.), personal distance (1 1/2-4 ft.), social distance (4-12 ft.), and public distance (12-25 ft.).

- Physical appearance.

- Time: also known as chronemics.

Paralanguage

Communication that is verbal, but wordless.

High-Contact Culture

A culture in which people touch frequently and maintain little personal distance with one another.

Low-Contact Culture

A culture in which people touch infrequently and maintain relatively high levels of personal distance with one another.

Listening

The active process of making meaning out of another person's spoken message.

Myths About Listening

- Hearing (the perception of sound) is the same as listening.

- It is natural and effortless.

- All listeners hear the same message.

HURIER Model

H: Hearing

U: Understanding

R: Remembering

I: Interpreting

E: Evaluating

R: Responding

Stonewalling

Responding with silence and a lack of facial expression.

Bachchanneling

Nodding your head or using facial expressions, vocalizations such as "uh-huh," and verbal statements such as "I understand." Lets the speaker know you're paying attention.

Paraphrasing

Restating in your own words to show the speaker that you understand.

Empathizing

Conveying to the speaker that you understand and share his or her feelings on the topic.

Supporting

Expressing your agreement with the speaker's opinion or point of view.

Analyzing

Providing your own perspective on what the speaker has said.

Advising

Communicating advice to the speaker about what he or she should think feel, or do.

Informational Listening

Listening to learn something.

Critical Listening

Listening with the goal of evaluating or analyzing what one hears.

Empathic Listening

Listening in order to experience what another person is thinking or feeling.

Inspirational Listening

Listening to be inspired.

Appreciative Listening

Listening for pure enjoyment.

Listening Barriers

- Noise: anything that distracts you from listening.

- Pseudolistening (pretending that one is listening) and selective attention (listening only to hear what one wants to hear).

- Information overload: the state of being overwhelmed by the amount of information one takes in.

- Glazing over: daydreaming during the time not spent listening.

- Rebuttal tendency: tendency to debate a speaker's point and formulate a reply while the person is still thinking.

- Closed-mindedness: the tendency not to listen to anything with which one disagrees.

- Competitive interrupting: using interruptions to take control of a conversation.

Becoming a Better Listener

- Separate what is and isn't said: clear any ambiguity, define what is implied. (Ex. "We should go to Chipotle" likely means that the person is hungry, even though that is never explicitly stated.)

- Avoid the confirmation bias: the tendency to pay attention only to information that supports one's values and beliefs while discounting or ignoring information that doesn't.

- Listen for substance more than for style: involves the vividness effect, which is the tendency for dramatic, shocking events to distort one's perception of reality.

Becoming a Better Critical Listener

- Be a skeptic.

- Evaluate a speaker's credibility.

- Understand probability.

Becoming a Better Empathic Listener

- Listen nonjudgmentally.

- Acknowledge feelings.

- Communicate support nonverbally.

Emotion

The body's multidimensional response to any event that enhances or inhibits one's goals. Different from a mood, which is a feeling, often prolonged, that has no identifiable cause, because its cause is identifiable.

Joyful/Affectionate Emotions

- Happiness: a state of contentment, joy, pleasure, and cheer.

- Love: the emotion of caring for, feeling attached to, and feeling deeply committed to someone.

- Passion: a secondary emotion consisting of joy and surprise, plus experiences of excitement and attraction for another.

- Liking: a positive overall evaluation of another person.

Hostile Emotions

- Anger: an emotional response to being wronged.

- Contempt: a feeling of superiority over, and disrespect for, others.

- Disgust: a feeling of revulsion in reaction to something offensive.

- Jealousy: the perception that the existence or the quality of an important relationship is being threatened by a third party.

- Envy: the desire for something another person has.

Sad/Anxious Emotions

- Sadness: emotions involving feeling unhappy, sorrowful, and discouraged, usually as a result of some form of loss.

- Depression: a physical illness involving excessive fatigue, insomnia, changes in weight, feelings of worthlessness, and/or thoughts of suicide or death.

- Grief: the emotional process of dealing with profound loss.

- Fear: the mind and body's reaction to perceived danger.

- Social anxiety: fear of not making a good impression on others.

Amygdala

A cluster of neurons in the brain that largely controls the body's fear response.

Primary Emotions

Distinct emotional experiences not consisting of combinations of other emotions.

Secondary Emotions

Emotions composed of combinations of primary emotions.

Display Rules

Unwritten codes that govern the ways people manage and express emotions.

- Intensification: acting as though you're terrified when you're only mildly worried.

- De-intensification: acting as though you're mildly worried when you're actually terrified.

- Simulation: acting as though you're terrified when you are really indifferent.

- Inhibition: acting as though you're indifferent when you are actually terrified.

- Masking: acting as though you're terrified when you're actually sad.

Need to Belong

A hypothesis that says each of us is born with a fundamental drive to seek, form, maintain, and protect strong social relationships.

Why Relationships Matter

- We need to belong.

- They bring us rewards: emotional, material, and health.

- They carry costs as well as rewards.

Attraction Theory

A theory that explains why individuals are drawn to others.

We are attracted by appearance, proximity, similarity, and complementarity.

Interpersonal Attraction

Any force that draws people together to form a relationship.

Physical Attraction

Attraction to someone's physical appearance.

Social Attraction

Attraction to someone's personality.

Task Attraction

Attraction to someone's abilities and dependability.

Uncertainty Reduction Theory

A theory suggesting that people are motivated to reduce their uncertainty about others.

Predicted Outcome Value Theory

A theory predicting that we form relationships when we think the effort will be worth it.

Approach Behaviors

Communication behaviors that signal one's interest in getting to know someone.

Social Exchange Theory

A theory predicting that people seek to form and maintain relationships in which the benefits outweigh the costs.

Comparison Level

A person's realistic expectation of what the person wants and thinks he or she deserves from a relationship.

Avoidance Behaviors

Communication behaviors that signal one's lack of interest in getting to know someone.

Comparison Level for Alternatives

A person's assessment of how good his or her current relationship is, compared with other options.

Equity Theory

A theory predicting that a good relationship is one in which a person's ration of costs and rewards is equal to that of the person's partner.

Over-Benefited

The state in which one's relational rewards exceed one's relational costs.

Under-Benefited

The state in which one's relational costs exceed one's relational rewards.

Relational Maintenance Behaviors

- Positivity.

- Openness.

- Assurances.

- Social networks.

- Sharing tasks.

Characteristics of Friendships

- They are voluntary.

- They are usually between peers (someone of similar power or status).

- They are governed by rules.

- They differ by sex.